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Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training
(arstechnica.com)
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It's what's going to happen. It's what always happens. And on a side note, by the way, I guaran-fucking-tee you that it's what's going to eventually happen with Discord as well. I have zero doubt about it.
I'm surprised that Slack beat Discord to it.
But yeah, you're right. We need to invest our time, energy and support into self hosted solutions.
Do you know how to break the cycle? Use open-source software. Use standard protocols that aren't locked behind some greedy corporation.
Why not take the features from Discord/Slack and integrate it into a new IRC or Jabber protocol?
Has anybody tried Revolt? It looks really cool. Like a proper open source alternative to Discord. But I never had the opportunity to try it with anyone, so I don't know.
Interesting, the name sounds familiar, it's not based on Matrix and they're planning encrypted messages. Oh, you can self-host it!
Mumble hasn't fed any of my data to a megacorp!
Technically, being open source or free ala GPL isn't enough. Protocols aren't enough.
You need a guarantee that you own your data.
I mean, if the Threadiverse has enough volume to be useful, someone -- probably many people -- are going to be logging and training things off it too.
That's the nature of public shit posting.
The real issue is that tech creeps and other pests think they own my shit posting.
At this point, I think the genie is out of the bottle. I feel like unless you're on some p2p encrypted chat, anything typed into the internet is getting scraped. I'm sure everyone at this point has had at least one comment scraped and used for language model stuff.
I don't like it. But it seems like corporations will always find ways to make money off of other people no matter what
To be honest, if someone thought that public things on the internet are not getting scraped, I am not sure what to tell them… Search engines have been doing it since the beginning of search engines, it is no wonder that the same would be done to train AI.
It’s not no matter what. It’s under the system we have they are not only not punished for doing so, they are heavily incentivized to do so. There are ways to punish bad actors that de-incentivize other potential bad actors, our politicians actively choose to prioritize these bad actors ability to do harm over the well being of the population.
I honestly don't get the outage over that. I feel like I'm in the minority on that, though. I don't care if linguistic statics are gathered from my public comments. Knock yourself out.
This story is about "private" messages on a free hosted service, and I think their users are just being naive if they think this is beyond the pale. But I get the feeling of violation at least a little.
Corporations are bad and yet still follow laws (in the west). The bigger issue is state actors. Especially the non-democratic ones.